The casting process for producing cast steel parts is advantageous due to its wide range of material applications, enabling the manufacture of various precision cast steel parts, as well as castings from aluminum alloys, ferroalloys, and copper alloys. For brittle alloys with poor plasticity, such as ordinary cast iron, casting is the only viable forming process. Cast steel parts possess a certain dimensional accuracy, generally exceeding that of ordinary forgings and welded parts. Furthermore, the production cost of cast steel parts is low, offering excellent overall economic performance, and its energy and material consumption and production costs are unmatched by other metal forming methods.
Steel castings have high melting points, resulting in correspondingly high pouring temperatures. At high temperatures, the interaction between molten steel and the mold material makes sand adhesion defects very easy to occur. Therefore, artificially produced silica sand with high refractoriness should be used for the mold, and a coating made of silica powder or zircon sand powder should be applied to the mold surface. To significantly reduce gas sources, improve the fluidity of molten steel, and enhance mold strength, most steel castings are produced using dry or fast-drying molds, such as CO2-hardened water glass sand molds.
Cast steel parts typically account for 40% to 80% of the total mass of mechanical equipment, while their manufacturing cost accounts for only 25% to 30% of the total equipment cost. For brittle alloy materials with poor plasticity, such as ordinary cast iron, casting is the only feasible forming process. Cast steel parts have a certain dimensional accuracy, which is generally more precise than that of ordinary forgings and welded parts.
